An SFC is a network technology which is being researched and standardized at present. From development of a data center network to an overlay network, a network edge becomes a demarcation point between a virtual network and a physical network, wherein the network edge is a server or The Onion Router (ToR), and may also be a gateway. However, an overlay technology does not solve all problems, there is still so much middleware in a data center, such as a firewall/load balancer, processing of all the equipment is implemented on a basis of user services, and it is obviously inappropriate to cross the equipment through tunnels.
Such a deployment model of the data center requires that a virtual firewall/load balancer may be freely deployed in a network and is namely unrelated to a network topology. As a result, a new problem arises: how to flexibly process traffic through the virtual firewall/load balancer? Then, a novel middleware such as the virtual firewall/load balancer is produced, and the virtual firewall/load balancer is deployed on an edge of a network and may be implemented by a standard server.
A service processing function such as a virtual firewall/load balancer/gateway is called a Service Function (SF), and traffic is processed by a series of SFs to form SFC. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of an SFC according to the related art, and as shown in FIG. 1, full line/dotted line represents two service chains.
In the related art, a present SFC framework may substantially include the following components:
(1) service overlay, i.e. an overlay technology for communication of each network edge node;
(2) Generic Service Control Plane (GSCP), i.e. a controller forming the SFC;
(3) service classification, that is, it is necessary to perform flow identification and then perform specific SFC processing on a specific flow; and
(4) dataplane metadata, which is a major characteristic, the metadata allowing each edge service processing node to exchange information with one another to achieve a certain service processing purpose.
From the above, the SFC may separate an SF and a forwarding function of network equipment, thereby implementing independent operation and processing of the SF and improving forwarding performance of the network equipment.
For an existing SFC technology, a session and forwarding table generated for a service are usually created and stored on the SFC, and it is not clearly defined that the created forwarding table is required to be forwarded to forwarding equipment such as a router, a switch, a hardware firewall and Customer Premise Equipment (CPE).
However, in some specific scenarios, SFC data forwarding in the related art may cause a data traffic forwarding failure.
For example, FIG. 2 is an application schematic diagram of CPE in an SFC scenario according to the related art. As shown in FIG. 2, a group of user terminals directly access the CPE, a service classification component is integrated in the CPE, and a service to be processed by each piece of CPE is required to be uploaded to a group of SFC for processing. For a first outbound data packet, i.e. a first message of a certain data connection from an intranet (intranet user) to an extranet, each piece of CPE performs service classification processing on the service, loads the service in the SFC for processing and forwards the service to the extranet, and at this moment, the SFC creates a related session, i.e. a forwarding table. When only the CPE integrates the service classification component of the SFC and network equipment of the extranet does not implement the SFC, in such a scenario, inbound traffic (i.e. traffic from the extranet to the intranet (the intranet user)) is required to be forwarded to the CPE at first in the related art, and then the CPE sends the service to the SFC for service processing after processing the service through the service classification component. Since multiple pieces of CPE are managed by the SFC, the SFC is not directly connected with the user terminals, and it is impossible for the SFC to directly send the processed message to the user terminals.
For a problem that the SFC does not send a created forwarding table to forwarding equipment to cause a data traffic forwarding failure in the related art, there is yet no effective solution.